- Takc.exe contained a bug: When using pipe encoding with the parameter combination -ihs -sts0, the encoder stopped with an error message.

Only Takc.exe and it's readme have been modified.

Fixes in Beta 3 / 08-12-20

- On very rare occasions (about 1 of 250,000 seeks in my tests) the decoder could fail when seeking to the end of a file with a quite large (i am testing up to 4 MB) meta data structure (APEv2-tag) at the end. This resulted in an "undecodable" error message and affected the decoding library and the winamp plugin.

All binaries and the readme have been modified.

Fixes in Beta 4 / 08-12-30

- Tiny speed improvements. - If pipe encoding is used without the -ihs paramter (that is for instance required for foobar), TAKC will now reserve only 46 bytes in the header for the storage of wave file meta data. That's sufficient for a standard wave file header. Earlier version reserved 1 MB (!) in the header, making the compressed file accordingly bigger.

All binaries and the readme have been modified.

What's new

New Features:

- Support for 192 Khz Audio. - Seeking without seek table.

Caution: Decoders prior to those released with V1.1.0 can't decode 192 Khz files and can't seek in files without seek table.

Improvements:

- Encoding and decoding speed improvements of about 3 percent for presets p0 and p1 on my system. Also some decoding speedup for p2. - Fixed a bug in the encoder that resulted in suboptimal compression of some loud files and especially high resolution audio. Some files may gain about 0.05 percent of compression. Not much, but it comes without any speed penality. - Further clean up of the Code.

Modifications:

- I hope you don't mind but i always had the feeling 5 presets are enough. Therefore i dropped the appropriately 'Insane' named preset -p5 and instead made presets 3 and 4 stronger. Okay, new -p4 will nevertheless be slightly weaker than old -p5, because i have reduced the maximum predictor count from 256 to 160. Before doing this i performed a detailed analysis of predictor count * compression * speed. There are not many files which benefit from such high predictor orders. Two of my file sets contain many of such files, but even they will only loose about 0.10 percent compression. Not a big loss if in exchange you get nearly half the decoding (cpu power) requirements. - Removed option to modify the Prefilter sensitivity.

Known issues:

- If you use pipe decoding and the application reading the pipe is beeing terminated before the whole file has been read, TAKC may get into an endless loop and has to be manually killed with the task manager. I don't think this is a big issue but i will try to fix it in one of the next versions. BTW: Big thanks to shnutils for testing the pipe decoding! - There seem to be some compatibility issues with pipe decoding to some other applications ("crc1632.exe" has been reported). I will try to fix it in the next release.

Some remarks:

The beta release has been delayed because my enhanced validation procedure found some bugs in the new seeking-without-seektable feature. After the correction of the 3 bugs i found, i lost about 2 percent of speed because of now suboptimal code alignment.

Beta testing

The beta version has already gone through extensive testing performed by my automatic scripts. But especially because of the many changes for 1.1.0 rare bugs are still possible (as always...). Please try the beta release and report any bugs in this thread.

It's important to test the new seeking-without-seek table feature:

- Encode a file (big files would be nice and APEv2 tags too) with no seek table: -sts0- Play it back with Winamp or Foobar and perform some seeks.

I would also be happy about tests of compression efficiency and speed. Because the final release will have identical performance (there may be a speed variation of 1 to 2 percent because of different code alignment of another build), it does make sense to test the beta.